Abstract: Does speaking a language without number words change the way speakers of that language perceive exact quantities? The Pirahã are an Amazonian tribe who have been previously studied for their limited numerical system [Gordon, P. (2004). Numerical cognition without words: Evidence from Amazonia. Science 306, 496–499]. We show that the Pirahã have no linguistic method whatsoever for expressing exact quantity, not even ‘’one.” Despite this lack, when retested on the matching tasks used by Gordon, Pirahã speakers were able to perform exact matches with large numbers of objects perfectly but, as previously reported, they were inaccurate on matching tasks involving memory. These results suggest that language for exact number is a cultural invention rather than a linguistic universal, and that number words do not change our underlying representations of number but instead are a cognitive technology for keeping track of the cardinality of large sets across time, space, and changes in modality.
As far as I remember the children of the Pirahã performed better on arithmetric task than their parents.
There a lot of stuff like differentiating two monkey faces that small children are able to do but that gets lost when they grow up and those skills aren’t used.
So we could have evolved to put 3 apples onto a table, count them and sum them up to 4 apples? Humans are born with sight, does that imply that light evolved by natural selection? And I don’t know what makes you think that arithmetic is not complex, when indeed not even an infinite set of axioms can fully describe it. Also arithmetic is irreducible complex, eliminate the number three and all of arithmetic falls apart. The patterns that emerge just from the existence of the natural numbers are infinitely. Anyway, I thought the quote is food for thought, so I posted it. The book is a good read, highly recommended.
Humans are born with a basic sense of arithmetic that evolved over millions of years. Arithmetic also doesn’t happen to be very complex.
To nitpick, arithmetic is a cultural invention just like all other tools.
As far as I remember the children of the Pirahã performed better on arithmetric task than their parents.
There a lot of stuff like differentiating two monkey faces that small children are able to do but that gets lost when they grow up and those skills aren’t used.
So we could have evolved to put 3 apples onto a table, count them and sum them up to 4 apples? Humans are born with sight, does that imply that light evolved by natural selection? And I don’t know what makes you think that arithmetic is not complex, when indeed not even an infinite set of axioms can fully describe it. Also arithmetic is irreducible complex, eliminate the number three and all of arithmetic falls apart. The patterns that emerge just from the existence of the natural numbers are infinitely. Anyway, I thought the quote is food for thought, so I posted it. The book is a good read, highly recommended.